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| Diversify Your Traffic – Web
Directories & Niche Sites |
| Posted: 4-05-2006 |
| Author: Robert Burko |
Don’t put all your
eggs in one basket. It’s the age old saying that encourages
you to mitigate your risk by spreading yourself out instead
of relying on one thing only. Ask any stock broker and
they’ll tell you putting all your money in one company
is very risky and is rarely the right move. When you only
rely on one source, if something bad should happen you
have nothing else to fall back on. At the end of the day,
most people would agree this is basic common sense.
Enter the Google era, where many webmasters seem to have
tossed this conventional logic aside in favour of a Google-tunnel-vision.
It is true that Google is the most popular search engine
in the world today reaching 380 million unique users per
month. According to ComScore Media Metrix they have a
42.3% share of the search market. These numbers should
make webmasters stand up and pay attention, but it should
not make them neglect everything else.
Many SEOs (search engine optimizers) will exclusively
talk about obtaining a high ranking in Google, as if that
is the one and only way to drive traffic on the web. Other
SEOs see the web in a larger sense and, instead, treat
Google as one piece of the puzzle (albeit an important
piece). The good SEOs recognize that while most searches
may originate at Google, there are a lot of potential
website visitors and customers coming from other engines
that deserve some attention too. Fortunately, many of
the search engines determine the importance of a site
using similar criteria, so optimizing for one engine should
give you a boost in all the others as well. But if your
SEO is giving you ranking reports that only say Google,
it may be time to start asking where you rank in the other
engines. After all, no webmaster is prepared to say that
a customer coming from a website other than Google is
a customer they don’t want!
List Yourself in Web Directories
Your website traffic and customers can come from all over,
so you want to make sure that wherever customers looking,
they’ll find you. There are a lot of different web directories
on the Internet. Some catalogue all sorts of sites, while
others focus on a particular niche market. By taking just
a little bit of time you can launch a web directory campaign
that gets you listed in all the directories your potential
visitors may use. Best of all, many web directories will
let you submit your site for free, so this is a cost-effective
way to generate targeted traffic. The best directories
are those that offer a direct link back to your site.
This way, your directory campaign also becomes a link-building
campaign, and you boost your ranking on most search engines,
including Google. (Two birds with one stone, not too shabby!)
Find Those Niche Sites
The web was built based on links. It’s how web surfers
move from one site to another, following an endless flow
of information. You need to take advantage of this by
making sure that your site is linked to along this path.
If you are selling t-shirts, try to find a site that is
dedicated to the topic of t-shirts (or fashion, in this
instance). In this day and age, you are almost guaranteed
to find a site with t-shirt resources. Look for ways you
can generate a link to your site from theirs. If you have
some marketing dollars to spend, you may be able to buy
text or banner advertising, which will also provide a
link back to your site. You can send a quick, polite email
to the webmaster requesting to trade links (after all,
that sites wants links too!), or maybe you can contribute
content somehow and include a link to your site in your
author bio. There are a lot of different approaches you
can take, and as long as you end up getting a link to
your site, you’ll increase the likelihood of attracting
visitors who are following that information path.
The world wide web is a big place and it’s only getting
bigger. You should devote a good amount of resources to
the more important traffic drivers, like Google, but you
should not fall into a trap where that’s the only thing
you can rely on. By diversifying your incoming traffic
resources and listing yourself in web directories, you
will be better prepared for what the future may bring.
Robert Burko is president and founder of Eliteweb.cc,
an Internet portal featuring a best-of-the-web search
engine and a comprehensive search-engine-friendly web
directory
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